Process Nerd: Opposition parties launch bid for more supply days in response to Liberal slight

As minority power plays go, it doesn’t have the headline-grabbing pizazz of a straight-up non-confidence motion, but make no mistake: the latest Conservative-led bid by opposition parties to boost their collective and respective control over the House agenda could vapourize any lingering hope that Liberal legislative wranglers may have had of sticking with their preferred timeline.

The kicker?

They have no one to blame but themselves — or, more specifically, whoever it was who made the call to bump the most recent Conservative opposition day from Thursday to Friday, a move that is now poised to be stricken from the procedural playbook, courtesy of the motion put forward by Conservative House Leader Candice Bergen in response.

More critically, at least from the perspective of a government that, as detailed in last week’s Process Nerd, is already facing a time crunch to push through mission-critical bills before the summer recess, the Conservatives are also proposing to add three more opposition days — one for each of the three recognized opposition parties — to the current cycle, which is set to expire at the end of March.

So, why did a relatively minor, if last-minute, scheduling change cause such consternation across the aisle?

For starters, it effectively cut the time available for debate by half, as the Chamber shuts down early on Fridays.

It also made it more difficult for the Conservatives to muster up a critical mass of MPs to keep that debate going, as the then-looming week-long hiatus would have led most of those not on House duty to have made plans to head back to their ridings on Thursday night or Friday morning.

Finally, it made it much less likely that it would get much, if any, attention from either the media, who — like most MPs — tend to consider Friday sittings to be pretty much a write-off as far as generating news.

As Bergen put it in her opening pitch for the motion: “To be blunt and very clear, for all of us who have been here for a while and know this and for the newer MPs, giving an opposition party, any one of us, a Friday as an opposition day is a full-out slap. It is a full-out insult. It is a full-out, 100 per cent punishment.”

Now, it’s worth noting — and was, repeatedly, by the Liberal MPs who took part in the ensuing debate, that the current standing orders do allow governments to designate both Fridays and Wednesdays — which, due to the weekly caucus meetings, are also half days — as supply days.

Those same standing orders do, however, limit on how often they can do so: “In any calendar year, no more than one fifth of all the allotted days shall fall on a Wednesday and no more than one fifth thereof shall fall on a Friday.”

And while it does provide a wee bit of wiggle room for the government with a provision to temporarily extend the supply cycle from March 26 to April 2, it is equally firm on one key point: Not one of the three add-on days can be scheduled on a Wednesday or a Friday.

Given the current numbers in the House, if all three opposition parties back the Conservative pitch, it’s guaranteed to pass, with or without the support of the governing Liberals — and as it deals with matters within the exclusive jurisdiction of the House, it’s also binding: the new schedule will take effect immediately.

The upshot: Barring a sudden split in the opposition ranks, the Liberals are about to be hit with a three-day penalty in their race with the clock, which means they’re going to be even more dependent on the goodwill of their cross-aisle adversaries in order to have even a passable chance at getting their legislative agenda in under the wire.